Hadiths for Losers by Michael Muhammad Knight

Abu Hurayra narrated:
It was said, “O Messenger of God, from

what is our Lord?
He said, “From water not of earth, nor

of the heavens. He created a horse and made it

run. It sweated, and he created himself

from that sweat.”

“There is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing,” writers J. Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure, “ and all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner.” In The Queer God, theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid describes the relocation of God in marginalized and transgressive identities (such as “God the Whore” and “Sodomite God’) as “a project doomed to failure,” but goes on to say that “we should feel ourselves free to fail.” In Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmad asks, “So what does it mean to say that an object fails to do the work for which it was intended? . .  .  . A hammer might be broken and not enable me to do one thing, but it could still let me do something else.” So I wonder about the hadiths that have failed, and the chance that some of these seemingly broken or dysfunctional tools can be picked up for a different kind  task.

The story of Allah’s self-creation with horse sweat does not bear the endorsement of any hadith master; you’re not going to find it in the collections of Bukhari or Muslim, nor the rest of the broader Six Books canon, or even respected collections by lesser luminaries. It certainly did not show up in the Intro to Islam pamphlets and books that I encountered as a young convert. By all accounts, the narration is not to be treated as a source for any recognizably Islamic conception of God. The horse-sweat tradition represents an undesirable extreme, for which it has been rejected, reviled, and offered up as an example of dangerous content beyond the limits of acceptable, appropriate Islam. It stands forever outside. The hadith’s transmitters have been marked as heretics, poor scholars, liars, and self-serving charlatans. The weight of “orthodox” Muslim intellectual tradition, an immeasurable mountain of books, has fallen upon this narration of divine horse sweat with all of its weight, its force of truth, to crush the hadith and its claims.

With its advocates long gone, the horse-sweat hadith appears as the kind of failed tradition that we learn about only from its opponents, but the hadith’s condemnation is also where it gets interesting. The horse-sweat hadith and its implications about God might strike us as a radially unthinkable image of Islamic tradition, but it could not have been unthinkable (or undesirable) for every Muslin ever. Otherwise, the hadith would not have existed, let alone circulated enough to become known and merit refutation. To achieve the dissemination that could threaten responsible scholars, this hadith of God’s self-creation had to make sense to someone. While it’s not likely that the  Muhammad ever said these words. There were nonetheless Muslims who regarded the hadith as compatible with Muhammad’s message. Though the voices are lost to us – we have only the condemnations of the individuals named as the hadith’s original reporters and the master critics’ suspicion s of their motive – some people apparently believed this hadith to be true, or that it could be true, and these people apparently understood themselves to be Muslims.

What was Islam at the time when this idea of God could flow between teachers and students? Where were Islam’s limits in a world in which such hadiths pose a potential threat? What possibilities existed then that we can’t have today? Finally, how did unacceptable hadiths lose? Was it simply by being “wrong”? I am interested in the Muslims who first spread this hadith, the Muslims who believed in its content, and the space they occupied.

Sunni Islam has been called a “cult of authenticity” for the rigorous methodologies through which premodern scholars evaluated alleged statements by Muhammad, vetting transmissions and their transmitters in vast archives of commentary and critique. It has even been argued that these methodologies led to the creation of Sunni Islam as a thinkable concept. The hadith traditions emerged as a process of power, in which a sectarian movement, popularly called the Hadith Folk, circled the wagons around its master scholars and made claims for its methodological supremacy. The Hadith Folk produced compilations of Muhammad’s reported words and deeds as proof of their exclusive authority over his legacy. This coterie of elite proto-Sunni scholars, which pre-existed Sunnism, eventually won its fight and secured authorization to brand itself as the center of Sunni tradition, succeeding to such a degree that its text are now regarded as simply Sunni texts.

Yet the cult of authenticity, defined by its obsessive redrawing of borders between truth and forgery – borders over which it claims exclusive domain to construct and police by its own rules – also becomes a cult of inauthenticity. The making of ‘mainstream’ Islam spent a great deal of time thinking about Islam’s edges and fringes, and where that line of demarcation existed, just as an obsession with personal hygiene feeds an obsession with whatever undermines it: the dirt under your fingernails, flakes of dead skin, traces of sweat, snot, blood, pus, piss, and shit. A clean canon  could be achieved only by identifying and eliminating pollutants. This restless vigilance against the inauthentic produced its own anti-canon; just as the Hadith Folk scholars produced collections of Muhammad’s reported sayings and actions that were supported by the strongest evidence, they also gave attention to accounts that they condemned as weakly evidenced or outright forgeries. The scholars’ massive biographical dictionaries, cataloguing thousands of traditionists whom they privileged as trustworthy reporters of Muhammad’s words, were mirrored by compendiums of transmitters whom they deemed unreliable: reporters blacklisted as forgetful and lazy scholars, greedy scholars or hire, sectarian ideologues, unacceptable heretics, immoral and impious people, and simple poseurs looking for attention. The traditionists efforts at purifying the canon by exposing unreliable reports and reporters ironically meant that they also immortalized the dirt, producing and preserving an whole archive of the material they sought to erase. Thanks to their work, my bookshelves are now lined with excluded voices and rejected possibilities, defeated visions of Islam.

Hadith scholars regarded the horse-sweat tradition as mustahil, a textual artifact so bizarre and absurd that one could reject its content even without going through the usual process of vetting its transmitters. Nonetheless, they discussed the reporters out of loyalty to method and form. Ibn al-Jawezi (1126-1200) traces the narration to  Muhammad ibn Shuja al- Balkhi, an alleged anthropomorphist and ‘zealot’ who falsely attributed his forged hadiths to trustworthy sources; al-Balkhi in turn reported that he had heard from Hibban ibn Hilal Abu Habib al-Bahili, a Basran scholatr who had given up hadith studies out of frustration at the sloppiness of other Basran scholars; al –Bahili’s reported source was Hammad ibn Salama, a controversial Basran transmitter who was included in Muslim’s Sahih but avoided by Bukhari. The hadith is finally traced to a traditionist named Abu al-Muhazzim, who claimed to have reported it on the authority of Ab Hurayra, a Companion of the Prophet.

Experts in the classical method of transmitter-based hadith criticism – ilm aljiddam, literally the ‘science of men’- universally reviled Abvu al-Muhazzim with their professional terms of exclusion and marginalization, marking him as  da’if (weak), da’if jiddan (extremely weak), matruk (abandoned) , and la shay’in (nothing). In Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat, Abu al-Muhazzom’s disqualification comes at the hands of his own student, Shu’bash bin al-Hajjaj. Shu’bah pronounced Abu al-Muhazzinm aeal transmitter and charged that he saw him in the mosque at Thabiitb al-Banani, ‘lying on the ground’ ( mutruhan, which brings the additional qualification of being thrown down or dumped) and offering to report seventy hadiths for a fals, a copper coin valued at nine thousandth of a dinar. Modern Orientalist scholars also wrote him off: Ignatz Goldziher called Abu al-Muhazzim a ‘hadith beggar’, repeating Shu’bah’s charge that he peddled prophetic reports from the mosque floor. If you are willing to commodify and sell hadiths, it’s in your interest to offer rare hadiths that no one heard elsewhere, which in turn means that it’s best for business to simply invent them.

By all scholarly assessments, Abu al-Muhazzim was a loser. J Halberstam writers, ‘All losers are heirs of those who have lost before them.’ In many Muslim contexts, I am also a loser; I tend to associate with the wrong groups and cite the wrong sources. For quite a few Muslims, my name is dirt. Some of the most significant lineages that I have constructed for myself end up performing the opposite function that we usually ask from lineages; they serve only to disqualify me and delegitimize my opinions. This might lead me to a weird sense of kinship with Abu al-Muhazzim, the hadith hustler selling forgeries.

If we focus on its transmissions by problematic losers, the horse-sweat tradition also exposes vulnerable points in the hadith edifice that could shock the whole system. Despite al-Muhazzim’s poor reputation, he does show up in a few chains within the Six Books canon. Abu al-Muhazzim taught students who went on to become scholars of higher rank than himself. In theses teacher-student relationships, Abu al-Muhazzim represents a crack in the structure, a point of leakage between the inside and outside. Buhari does not use Abu al Muhazzims transmissions, but Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud and Ibn Maja cite him in hadiths on topics such as the sale of dogs and permissibility of eating locusts. In the Qur’an commentary of Ibn Kathir, a medieval scholar favored in modern Sunni revivalist circles, Abu al-Muhazzinm contributes to our understanding of the 113^th sura’s third verse. Citing Abu al Muhazzim, who in turn cites Abu Hurayra, Ibn Kathir tells us that Qur’an’s mention of ‘the evil night when it comes’ refers to a star. Abu al-Muhazzim might have been a loser, but the walls and barriers that keep losers out of the tradition remain significantly porous.

Sunnis were not the only Muslims with an intellectual tradition that could be called a cult of authenticity; other Muslim communities share this investment in finding authenticity and properly documenting the unacceptable. Mention the horse-sweat hadith appears in the Bab al Shayton (‘Gate of the Devil’), a tenth-century Isma’ili heresiography dedicated to cataloguing various groups that the compile condemns as standing beyond the pale of Islam. The text offers an entry on a group known as the Minhaliyya, so named for their leader, al-Minhal; Maymun al-‘Ijli, who apparently taught that God possessed attributes of lengthy, breadth, and width, as well as the abklity to change his form. The Minhaliyya reportedly articulated their opposition from a certain understanding of God’s absolute power. Nothing is more powerful than God; therefore, no being can possess a power that God lacks; this means that if the tradition portrays angels and evils as capable of changing their forms, God must also have this ability. The Minhaliyya then employ this theological point to argue that God can (and does) materialize with the form of humans, animals, plants, jinns, angels, and essentially any being or solid object.

The critical problem with cases such as Abu al-Muhazzim and the Minhaliyya remains that they do not get to speak for themselves; we learn about them from ‘orthodox’ scholars for whom they exist only as objects of suspicion and scorn. Relying on these polemical sources would be comparable to learning about Muslims today exclusively from Fox News. We should thus exercise caution when presuming knowledge of the Minhaliyya’s theology or the intentions of hadith scholars who transmitted the horse-sweat tradition. We can’t presume, as Ibn al Jawzi had, that reporters fabricated bizarre hadiths and forged their sources as part of a sectarian conspiracy to discredit hadith science.

In the archives of forgotten and failed masters, we also find Muhammad al-Zawawi, a fifteenth century North African visionary who kept an extensive diary of more than one hundred dream encounters with the Prophet. He did not win the status that his dream records claimed for him, but the diary survives. In one dream, Muhammad carries al-Zawawi like an infant, first holding al-Zawawi over his shoulder as though the Prophet would burp him. Then the Prophet cradles al- Zawawi and places his nipple in al  Zawawi’s mouth, nursing him. This was the nipple that felt the cold of God’s own hand; it’s notably the left nipple, closer to the prophetic heart that received knowledge through divine touch. The narrative echoes milk imagery found elsewhere, such as the hadiths found in Shi’i sources of Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib breastfeeding Muhammad when he was a toddler and of Husayn receiving milk through his grandfather’s thumb . The flow  of milk from Muhammad’s body into his grandson and al-Zawawi, beyond its loaded symbolism for al-Zawawi as a mystic heir to the Prophet’s knowledge, gives us an imaginary of the Prophet that perhaps we had not expected: Muhammad as wet nurse or even mother. I also want Muhammad’s milk. If this dream from six centuries ago becomes a resource for me, and Muhammad becomes my mother, does something change in my Islam? What I really mean to ask: with a new way to think about the Prophet, does something change in me? Maybe, or maybe not. The rejected library is a place for experiments.

As an introduction to Mohammad, what potential value can we find in a hadith that Muslim intellectual tradition and its mighty scholars, Sunni and Shi’i alike, uniformly rejected as a flagrant forgery and betrayal of all comprehensibly Islamic ideas about God? Not all hadiths rejected by scholars as inauthentic will offer tools to liberation: we should be thankful that premodern scholars denounced  false hadiths such as “A Black man lives only for his stomach and his genitals’ and ‘The intellect of women is in their vaginas.’ Power isn’t always on the wrong side, and sometimes we’ll find useful resources in the ‘official’ Muhammad of canonical texts and establishment scholars. But perhaps it’s worth remembering that beyond the limits of mainline scholarship, another Muhammad waits. The horse-sweat hadith reminds us that the Muhammad whom we pursue remains a contested terrain, a battlefield, and a burial ground where we encounter the winners of intellectual power struggles. We should remember that the losers are there too, their graves often unmarked but their bodies still fertilizing the soil.